'Too early to make Smolensk disaster movie' says culture minister

PR dla Zagranicy

Peter Gentle
28.12.2012 11:57

Poland's culture minister has said it is too early to make a movie about the causes of the 2010 Smolensk air disaster, after director Antoni Krauze announced that he is currently planning a film about the tragedy.

photo - Włodzmierz Pac/Polskie Radio.

“Movies about characters and events that are still fresh in the memory are very difficult,” Poland's culture minister Bogdan Zdrojewski believes.

Zdrojewski advised Antoni Krauze - director of the successful Black Thursday (Czarny Czwartek) 2011 film about the massacre by communist authorities of striking workers in 1970 - to “wait a little while till we have more distance” from the plane crash in western Russia which killed President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others on 10 April 2010.

Antoni Krauze, who Minister Zdrojewski said in an interview with a private TV channel in Poland was a “good and experienced director” told the right wing Gazeta Polska Codziennie newspaper in September that he has set up a special fund to finance the film after "new evidence that this tragedy was not just a plane crash".

The planned movie plot is thought to revolve around Russian involvement in a terrorist attack, a theory favoured by supporters of the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party – led by the late president's twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski - despite official reports by both Russia and Poland pointing to “human error” and bad weather as the cause of the disaster.

Minister Zdrojewski said that funding for the film may be compromised by fears that the project had become “politicized”. (pg)